Nostalgia

Yesterday morning, I was just wrapping up an electro session when Claire calls me. Her voice sounds different. She asks me about a girl on GP and if I have read it yet today. I tell her I just read a bit before I left early this morning. She says that the girl was talking about killing herself. She’d left me a very strange text message the night before, and after checking my phone again, she’d text messaged me two more right before Claire called. I jumped on the internet and tracked down her GP forum messages. I tried calling her, but no answer. Over the course of a few hours I talked back and forth to a number of friends both here and ones that lived near her, including Jayne and Sianna.

The hardest part about this is that our friend was mobile and we didn’t know where she was currently living. Her uncle beat her up two weeks ago after her mom told her uncle about her in an attempt to keep her from traveling to Chicago to meet us. She went to Chicago anyway and hung out with some of us. I could tell she was having a bit of trouble when she was chatting with us since she was still in boy mode and had a long road ahead of her to transition, if she so chooses. I mean, it has to be intimidating for someone just confronting their transgender feelings to meet TS that are either post-op or living successfully after having transitioned. I can remember getting flustered when I read Kate’s website and seeing her great FFS results. I was only a few months into HRT at that point, and I felt this rush that made me realize I wanted what she had. I wanted to transition and feel the happiness that she was feeling.

Over the course of the hours we tried to stop our friend from committing suicide, she text messaged me where we would be able to find her body. Immediately, I tried calling the police in her city, but it took forever to finally get routed there. In fact, I had to look up some emergency numbers in her city, but all that was listed was some campus police. I called them anyway and finally got the number. My freaking 411 service through my mobile phone provider had first routed me to some other city on the east coast. What a bunch of boneheads. Anyway, they took my information and said they had a unit on the way. My friend had text messaged a few other people as well, one who had already made contact with the police.

Claire and I conversed again, and I asked her to call some of the Kinko’s (she had posted that she was in a Kinko's) in the area of her proposed suicide attempt since my phone was rapidly running out of juice. Since I was on the road, the only place to charge it was in the car. I ran a friend back to her place as I was again on the phone trying to make contact with her. She text messaged that she saw the police when she was headed for the place, and decided to change locations. As I was driving my friend home, I told her I was debating jumping on a plane really fast so that I could try to track my friend down to talk to her since she wasn’t answering her phone. As soon as I dropped her off, I headed for the airport and text messaged my friend that I was flying there, and would she meet me at the airport.

I had just pulled into short term parking when my friend calls. Finally. She tells me I had better not be on a plane. I tell her I am ready to fly out if she will not seek help. I ask her to call someone…her therapist, the police….someone. She says she will. I believe her. I know that she is still in desperate need to talk to someone, so I hang up then walk into the terminal to check the schedules into my friend’s city. I look on the departure schedule – no direct flights. Damn.

I jump back into my car and head for home to check the other area airport flights, knowing for sure that the other airports do have direct flights. On the way home, my friend calls again and says that she talked to her therapist and the police, and has decided to drive up to another TS friend’s place to chill for the night. A sigh of relief came over me. We’d gotten through to her – suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. The only ones it hurts are the ones you love.

During our conversation I tried to tell her that I know she is in a difficult position right now. She is at the very beginning of transition and all she sees are the obstacles to where she needs to be. I told her she just has to manage through all of them because there is a huge reward at the end of it – you get to be you - you get to be happy. She asked me, “Are you happy?”

Am I happy? That question. I used to ask that question to all of the TS I met when I was first figuring out where I needed to go with all of this – where I needed to be to be happy. I would talk to as many post-transitional TS that I could, and I would ask them, “Are you happy?” Now I was being asked the very same question. Have I come that far that I am now at a place where a few years ago I never realized I would be? Am I happy? You better believe I’m happy. Well, close enough…for now. I still have a few steps to take, but yeah, I’m there.

I told my friend, “Yes, I’m happy. I’m finally me.”

We chatted for a bit longer. She was crashing at a mutual friend's place and seemed to be a bit more in control. She seemed to be doing much better today, but there are still a lot of things she needs to work out. Transition is not an easy road – not at all. In fact, it’s very hard, but there is a reward when you get to where you need to be. I think she’ll make it one day, and then, she too can answer the question, “Are you happy?”